The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

The conductor was unconvinced. “I am sorry, but you will have to pay for your ticket to Basel, or I will have to ask you to leave the train.”

“But, sir,” we argued, “all the other conductors have accepted our tickets with no problem.”

The conductor shrugged and shook his head again.

“Please, sir,” pleaded Yoav, “if you allow us to get to Basel, we will give you this tape of the Doors. They’re a great American rock band.”

The conductor did not seem amused or particularly interested in the Doors. “Okay,” he said. “You can go to Basel.”

We weren’t sure whether he finally agreed with us, appreciated the gesture, or had just given up. After that incident we stopped adding lines to our map, and soon we returned to our original planned path.

LOOKING BACK ON our dishonest behavior, I am tempted to chalk it up to the stupidity of youth. But I know that’s not the whole picture. In fact, I suspect that there are a number of aspects of the situation that enabled us to behave that way and justify our actions as perfectly acceptable.

First, I’m sure that being in a foreign country by ourselves for the first time helped us feel more comfortable with the new rules we were creating.^* If we had stopped to give our actions more thought, we would have certainly recognized their seriousness, but somehow without thinking much, we imagined that our creative route enhancements were part of the regular Eurail procedure. Second, losing a few hundred dollars and Yoav’s sneakers made us feel that it was okay for us to take some revenge and get Europe to pay us back. Third, since we were on an adventure, maybe we felt more morally adventurous too. Fourth, we justified our actions by convincing ourselves that we weren’t really hurting anything or anyone. After all, we were just drawing a few extra lines on a piece of paper. The train was going on its track anyway; and besides, the trains were never full, so we weren’t displacing anyone. It was also the case that we very easily justified our actions to ourselves because when we originally purchased the tickets, we could have picked a different route for the same price. And since the different paths were the same to the Eurail office when we originally purchased the tickets, why would it matter at what point in time we decided to choose a different path? (Maybe that’s how people who back-date stock options justify their actions to themselves.) A final source of justification had to do with the physical nature of the ticket itself. Because the Eurail ticket seller had given us just a flimsy piece of photocopied paper with a hand drawing of our planned route, it was physically easy for us to make our changes—and because we were just marking the path in the same way as the ticket seller (making lines on a piece of paper), this physical ease quickly translated into a moral ease as well.

When I think about all of these justifications together, I realize how extensive and expansive our ability to justify is and how prevalent rationalization can be in just about every one of our daily activities. We have an incredible ability to distance ourselves in all kinds of ways from the knowledge that we are breaking the rules, especially when our actions are a few steps removed from causing direct harm to someone else.

The Cheater’s Department

Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Throughout history, there has been no dearth of creative borrowers. William Shakespeare found his plot ideas in classical Greek, Roman, Italian, and historical sources and then wrote brilliant plays based on them. Even Steve Jobs occasionally boasted that much like Picasso, Apple was shameless about stealing great ideas.

Our experiments thus far suggested that creativity is a guiding force when it comes to cheating. But we didn’t know whether we could take some people, increase their creativity, and with it also increase their level of dishonesty. This is where the next step of our empirical investigation came in.